Long shutdown times in OS X Mountain Lion even after 2 clean installs...

I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion yesterday via clean installation by downloading the OS X 10.8.2 installer from the Mac App Store and restoring it to a USB. So far, everything is working as expected, however I am experiencing higher than expected shutdown times (around the 20 seconds) in Mountain Lion. In Snow Leopard and Lion the average shutdown times that I had where in the range of 2-5 seconds. The reason of why I am reporting the slow shutdown time is that I was part of the OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview program and at one point I had a partition in my MacBook Pro with the OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 GM Build (12A269) which was made available in the Mac App Store and the shutdown times were short and similar to those in OS X Snow Leopard and OS X Lion. Off course, given that I am very cautious when upgrading since my horrible experience with OS X Lion's release build, I waited up until yesterday to fully migrate to OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 since I thought that by the time of the X.X.2 release many of the kinks were being ironed out.

Anyway, I tried to solve the issue is to reinstall OS X Mountain Lion for a second time by cleaning the disk and zeroing it out on Disk Utility. I used a bootable USB installer that I made with the original installer of the app store and that has been used by many users to cleanly update their systems. The reason of why I did a second clean reinstall was to see if there was a particular app that created the issue and decided to run the computer on its factory set up before putting any new apps, before testing the computer I did a reset command so that I would boot into a new computer session and allow the OS to build its caches. The shutdown process in the reboot was slow there. I was expecting that one of my third party apps would be the reason of why my MacBook's shutdown was slow but that wasn't the case because after 30 minutes of use the shutdown time was still long without any third party apps. Due to this revelation, I decided to reboot my computer but use verbose mode because it would give me what processes are running at shutdown. Since, I could not possibly write down all the processes, I used a camera to take a picture of the verbose dialogs during shutdown. Using the same usage methodology in the previous computing session where I kept the computer running for about 30 minutes; the long shutdown was duplicated successfully.

Here are the pictures... I picked the three best pictures for clarity purposes, but they show all the available information on the screen during the complete shutdown process.

shut it down normally from the apple menu. just before you hit the shut down button uncheck the box that says restart the programs that were running. Let it sit there.... if you get any warning signs then force quit mail. then open mail then quit mail normally. each subsequent time it will be fine.

more than like likely you will need to reinstall the OS X by holding down command + R when the computer starts.

Hello Carlo,

Thanks for your second response. However, I think it won't be of much help since essentially, I will be downloading the same 10.8.2 installer available from the Mac App Store which more than likely will have the same long shutdown issue. I think this is more of a problem with OS X 10.8.2 given that I did not experience this issue with OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 (GM Build 12A269) which also was released on the Mac App Store.

In addition, I am backing up my findings due to the fact that a good amount of users are experiencing long shutdown times after installing the OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 update:

try it... you have only to gain improved performance. It will take you ~1 hour and 30ish minutes.

But I have already done that 2 times. I performed a clean install using the recovery tools in OS X Mountain Lion, the only difference is that I am using a USB stick with the full OS X 10.8.2 installer because of the fact that if I do install OS X with the help of the Recovery HD partition, it will take me approximately 3 hours to download OS X Mountain Lion with my 3mbps connection.

I think this is more of an issue with the 10.8.2 update installer that Apple has provided via their servers and the Mac App Store. I am also in a clean sheet system which means that there aren't any third party conflicts. Also, as I previously stated, the computer seems to be trying to shut down the launchd.peruser.501 process in OS X Mountain Lion.

Today, I got some time to reinstall OS X Mountain Lion from the Recovery Partition and it downloaded OS X. So far I am not experiencing the problem of the slow shutdown so far (less than 4 hours since reinstalling). However, I think this is due to me installing the supplemental update of OS X Mountain Lion which revised the build number from 12C54 to 12C60. But I am wondering if I should reinstall the OS all toguether since I saw something unusual from the installation when the computer finished up the installation of OS X. Just a few seconds before the set up assistant of OS X Mountain Lion appeared, the Apple menu bar appeared briefly and then it disappeared and the set up assistant opened asking for the regional location of the computer, after going through the complete set up assistant. I find odd that the Apple Menu appeared just before the set up assistant appeared and then disappeared since this has never happened to me in an OS X installation before. Do you think this error of the Apple Menu appearing momentarly and disappearing before the set up assistant appeared a few seconds after merits a reinstall of the OS?

No i dont think you need to reinstall the OS all together. I ocassionally have a slow shut down... but it is either because an application did not finish what ever it was it was doing or i was impatient. I have had this happen with Mail mostly and this happens rarely. I think the computer remembers how it was shut down. I think it was just a quirk that the apple menu disapeard temporarlily. Go to your application folder. Inside that there is a utility folder. Inside that there is an app called disk utility. Open disk utilty and select your hard drive on the left (usually the second icon) and click repair permissions. I think you will be good. I have run the reinstall on my computer a few times since installing ML... but it was only because I felt I did something i should not have been doing or because something was quirky. I am really having no problems with it. It runs smoothly. I sort of dropped my laptop bag the other day, so now i am a litte paranoid i might one day when i get time just have the folks at apple look at it and dust it for me. I do also back up my computer religiously... using the timemachine in system preferences. that is a good program. But from my experience I am learning it is best to have two backups just incase something happens to the first back up. I am paranoid i guess.

The quirk with the Apple menu was that it appeared before the OS X Set Up Assistant that is used to set up the OS after it is installed. This is not supposed to happen on regular OS X installation since the menu shouldn't appear up until you log in to the desktop for the first time. Other than tha quirk the system is working fine so far. You say that you've have reinstalled OS X a few times before due to some quirks under your definition, which quirk should merit a consideration to reinstall the system?

Honestly, like you I am a little paranoid about these quirks because they don't fit in what I saw in previous experiences.

no worries. yup i have done it a few times. It wet smoothly even though i had a backup near by in case my data was lost... but it did not touch my data. It was for things like a long shut down, or I did not understand why my hard drive was missing from my desktop (siple explaintion i found out later) or I guess if i got a weird crash.

no worries. yup i have done it a few times. It wet smoothly even though i had a backup near by in case my data was lost... but it did not touch my data. It was for things like a long shut down, or I did not understand why my hard drive was missing from my desktop (siple explaintion i found out later) or I guess if i got a weird crash.

Hello again,

One last question, when you reinstall OS X do you just Erase the drive or do a zero-out format of the drive?

No...No... not at alll... if you see that you are in the wrong area... you probably are in disk utility. Do not Erase or zero out the drive... just restart the computer holding down command+R and select reinstall OS X. Don't erase or zero anything out.

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